Adele's '25' Is Now Available In Full On Streaming Platforms For The First Time

Copies of the new Adele album "25" are displayed at a Target Corp. store in Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S., on Friday, Nov. 27, 2015. In 2011, several big U.S. retailers moved their opening times to midnight; in 2012, Wal-Mart crossed the Rubicon and opened its stores at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. But after last year's Thanksgiving weekend retail sales fell 11 percent from the year before while overall holiday sales rose, some retailers have been reconsidering. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

It’s Friday, and if you were looking for some great music to listen to this weekend, there is a very high profile option that has just become widely available in a way that many people have been waiting for. As of today, Adele’s 25 is now on the most popular streaming platforms, which is new for the record, despite the fact that it has already been for sale for over half a year.

Before today, only a select few tracks from the album were made available on streaming platforms, and they were all uploaded at different times. A few weeks ahead of 25's proper release, lead single “Hello” was featured on streaming sites, and its presence on those platforms helped the track debut at number one with incredible numbers attached to its first week. Since then, the song has been played consistently, with stream counts easily reaching into the billions when combining YouTube, Spotify, and others.

In the months since “Hello” stormed onto the charts, follow up singles “When We Were Young” and new cut “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” have also come around on streaming, and both of them have made it into the top 20 on the Hot 100 singles ranking and performed equally as well around the world.

While 25 might be new to streaming, Adele is not. Both of her previous albums (19 and 21) have been playable for a long time now, and even though she didn’t allow 25 to be streamed in full, music lovers around the world flocked to her on these platforms anyway. For a long time before 25's street date, nobody working with the singer would confirm or deny if the album was going to be available on streaming when it first dropped, and it was only made clear just days before 25 went on sale that it would not be streamable, and nobody could say how long that would be the case.

Despite not being available on streaming services—or perhaps because of that very reason—25 is the best-selling album in the world since the last time Adele released something. 25 was initially released in late November of late last year, and from the moment it hit store shelves, it was unstoppable. The gargantuan title sold 3.38 million copies in its first week alone... And that’s just in the U.S. Such a massive start put Adele in the record books as the only person to sell at least three million copies of one title in a single week, and in the seven months since, the album hasn’t dipped far. In fact, it has now sold over 20 million copies globally, and the record continues to make it into the top ten in some of the biggest markets in the world week after week.

25 is available for listening on many of the major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Prime Music.

I am a freelance music journalist based in New York City. My byline has appeared in The Huffington Post, Billboard, Mashable, Noisey, The Hollywood Reporter, MTV, Fuse, and dozens of other magazines and blogs around the world. I love following charts and the biggest and most...